The New Veeam Office 365 Backup and Restore v2.0 Capability

On Thursday the 10th of May 2018, Veeam Software released Veeam Backup for Office 365 version 2.0 for controlled public beta testing. What are the new features introduced in this version? Will these new features help you to protect your organisation’s Office 365 subscription?

Well, on this post I will provide a list of the new features and enhancements included in this beta release. I have tested them, and I liked them.

To obtain the Veeam Backup for Office (VBO) 365 v2.0 beta package, you are welcome to contact your local Veeam team; they will be able to help you obtain a copy of the package.

So, let’s start with the review:

Distributed Installation

One thing I like about the new version is that you don’t need to wait long to start experiencing the new features and enhancements. Starting with the installation of version 2.0, you can separate the VBO 365 installation components and install them on different servers. You can separate the VBO365 server from the management console and/or Powershell, allowing customers to remotely manage the VBO 365 server.

Complete Office 365 Offering Backup

The most important features added in this new version is the support for Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft OneDrive. Now users can choose to back up the entire Office 365 organisation or select a particular object(s) to be backed up. The objects can be a SharePoint site, libraries, items and documents, or OneDrive documents, as illustrated in the following screenshot.

Users and Groups Selected Backup

Veeam has introduced users and group selection for backup. This allows you to easily select the users or groups to be backed up, and you can do this without scripting or APIs. This feature assists organisations to easily back up their Office 365 mail by selecting users or groups, or users and groups, as shown in the following screenshots.

The same thing applies to exclusions; you can also run a backup that excludes particular users, groups, or sites.

Microsoft Exchange Item Comparing

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange is not a newcomer to Veeam VBO365; but, in this new version, Veeam R&D has added several attractive features to the Veeam Explorer for Exchange capabilities, and the most notable of them is item comparison. Now the backup administrator can compare the Exchange items between the Production version and the backup version before restoring the item. This feature will save time, disk space and cost. To use this feature, you right click on the mailbox item and chose to compare with the version of Production:

If there are no differences between the PROD version and the backup version, there will be nothing presented. You can still check the tick box for Show unchanged properties to learn more about the item.

SharePoint and OneDrive Veeam Explorers

Veeam Explorer supports Microsoft Exchange, and with this new version protecting Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive, Veeam included Veeam Explorers for SharePoint and OneDrive, where you can browse and restore sites, documents, and similar items.

In addition to the known Veeam Explorer capabilities, Veeam Explorer for SharePoint will allow users to save SharePoint custom list templates. With these, you can nominate where an item will be stored in the backup file. The templates are loaded automatically during the Veeam Explorer run and allows you to view the custom list data without performing any additional steps.

Colour Schemes

From the screenshots on this blog, you can see that I been able to change the colour scheme of the VBO 365 user interface. Currently, Veeam offers a choice of four pre-configured colours, as shown below:

Conclusion

I have been testing Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2.0 for some time now. The performance and the capabilities that have been added to version 2.0 is a welcome addition to a great product, especially the support of Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive. The new functionality of VBO 365 supporting SharePoint and OneDrive covering both the backup and the restore tasks for online and on-premises is very exciting.

As usual, Veeam R&D has come up with a new surprise, as they do every time they release a new product or version.